134 Animal Life 
which is only represented at the present day by the prongbuck, a horny projection 
erows out from the pedicel or bony core, and this, which may answer to the velvet of 
the deer’s horns, falls off every year. In the fourth and last family—the bovines—the 
bony core grows continuously often to great lengths from the skull, and is covered 
throughout by a horny sheath which is of greater length than the bony core that it 
covers. In the dead animal this horny sheath is easily detached, and it is even said 
that some existing forms of antelopes during lifetime can shed from disease or other 
causes the horny coverings of the os cornu. Therefore the Bovide or family of 
Artiodactyles, to which the antelopes belong, are termed the hollow-horned ruminants 
(Cavicornia). 
But it is also in the shape and appearance of the horns that the Bovide are 
again subdivided into two distinct groups (according to the views of the present 
writer). These are the ox-lke forms—the oxen and the tragelaphs—in which the 
erowth of the horn from base to tip is relatively continuous; and the antelopes proper 
(meluding the sheep, goats, and capricorns), in which the growth of the horn, at any 
rate for two-thirds of its length, is marked by nearly complete annulations or rings, 
often forming very marked projections or knobs. (Compare, for instance, the relatively 
smooth and uninterrupted surface of an ox horn with the regularly spaced knobs on the 
horns of an ibex, the rings in the horns of certain sheep—especially in the female—and 
the still more marked projecting ridges on the horns of almost all antelopes). If this 
feature was unaccompanied by other poimts of difference, it should not be allowed to 
weigh too strongly in the classification of the different forms of a group which lke the 
bovines is such a homogeneous one; but there are other details connected with the soft 
parts, the bones of the feet, the number and shape of the teeth, and the markings of the 
skin, which, so to speak, take sides and lend importance to this small detail in horn growth 
as a distinguishing feature between the oxen-like creatures on the one hand (oxen and 
tragelaphs) and 
the antelope-like 
creatures on the 
other. At the 
same time it 
should be pointed 
out that in those 
two groups of 
antelopes—the 
cephalophines and 
the capricorns— 
which are perhaps 
most primitive in 
structure among 
the antelopes, the 
annulations in the 
horn growth are 
least marked; 
while among the 
buffaloes, which 
are the most s 
primitive of living < 
oxen, and here and 
there amongst 
tragelaphs, there 
From @ Drawmy by the Author. 
YELLOW-BACKED DUIKER. 
